Cuban natives reunite with ballet teachers as teen preps to compete

Saturday

Jul 12, 2014 at 9:57 PMJul 12, 2014 at 10:38 PM

By Carrie SeidmanHalifax Media Services

Editor's note: This story is the second in a series.Ariel Serrano has been watching the luggage carousel at the Jose´Marti´Airport in Havana for more than two hours since the arrival of his flight from Tampa. At last he sees his suitcase amid the stream of shrink-wrapped bundles that represent American goods being brought home by Cuban natives. Serrano breaks into a smile. Familiar with the mañana attitude in the land of his birth, this seems like an acceptable wait time.“You see? It is not impossible,” he says. “In Cuba, it is difficult, but not impossible. A lot of things have changed.”But in fact, during the 20-minute cab ride to downtown Havana, it's easier to see what has not changed.Signs of the revolution — its hopeful promise and its devastating effects — are everywhere.There are no uniforms, no umpires, no bleachers. But there is a small and enthusiastic crowd of spectators seeking shade under a nearby tree. Baseball is ballet's only popular rival in Cuba.When Francisco Serrano, known to friends and family as “Panchi,” was about the age his father was at the start of his dance career, he asked his parents if he could join Little League. Despite growing up around ballet studios when his parents danced with the Sarasota Ballet and living with his mother's hope that he might follow in their footsteps, he had long ago rejected the notion. The tiny slippers they'd bought during his toddlerhood went unworn.For Ariel Serrano, who harbored painful memories of his own introduction to ballet and of the end of his career, his son's choice provided almost a sense of relief. Far better — and easier — to sign on as a coach for the Little League team. It would be a father-son thing, not a potential career with all the pressures and emotions of the world he had left behind.“I coached him because I knew nothing about it, and it was fun to spend the afternoons three days a week tossing the ball with him,” he says. “Ballet? That's another business entirely.”But after several years, Francisco grew tired of shagging fly balls. At about the same time, he also grew weary of waiting around with his mother outside his younger sister Camilla's ballet classes. Watching her, he couldn't help but feel that he'd like to try too, and that he might just be pretty good at it.One day, he asked his mother if he could give up baseball and switch to ballet. She was thrilled. Not so her husband, who refused to have anything to do with his son's belated interest. He believed this was just another passing adolescent phase, and there was no way he was going to revisit the pains of his past for his son's temporary amusement.At the time, Hernandez was teaching at a local Sarasota studio, so she began coaching her son privately there. Despite his late start, it was clear that he had more potential than she, or even her husband, ever had. Francisco had inherited the best physical traits of each of them, her extreme elasticity, Serrano's buoyant leap and ability to endlessly turn. His good looks didn't hurt either.For two years Hernandez worked with her son on her own. After the first year, she began casually mentioning his progress to her husband, encouraging him to come see how Francisco was doing.Serrano refused.The couple sunk their entire savings — close to $26,000 — into the project. When they needed a last influx of cash to finish the flooring, they sold their motorbike.They opened the Sarasota Cuban Ballet School in April of 2011 with three students, one of them Francisco. They had no financial reserve and little potential for an adequate income to keep things afloat. For the first nine months, they made just enough to cover the electricity and water bills, and the reduced rent the building owner agreed to in exchange for the renovation. With several established studios in town, including the venerable Sarasota Ballet School, the future of their enterprise seemed dubious.Less than a year later, Serrano took a group of students to the Atlanta regionals of the Youth America Grand Prix competition, the world's largest ballet scholarship contest. Francisco won the Grand Prix — the top overall award of the entire event, male or female — and the studio won “Best School” honors.There was no doubt in Serrano's mind that his son would have the successful career he never had.But suddenly, that was no longer enough.A plan began to percolate in Serrano's mind. A plan to build a permanent ballet bridge between his two homes and the ballet world in each. A plan to take everything positive he had gained from his childhood and use it to feed the talent in his adopted country, a place that had given him the opportunities his native land never could. A plan to give back — to his mother, his teachers and to Cuba — in a way he had never before envisioned.Grandiose? Of course. Overly optimistic? That was his way. Nothing was impossible, he felt; he'd already seen impossible dreams come true.So, this trip to Havana is a first small step.The Cuban National Ballet School is housed in a grand three-story building with a central courtyard on a wide boulevard known as the Prado. It is several blocks from the city's domed capitol building, now engulfed in scaffolding and closed for renovation, and a bit farther from Havana Vieja, “Old Havana,” the tourist district. A former social club for the Spanish elite, it is an impressive structure, ringed entirely on each floor by tall, narrow, arched windows left open on both the street and courtyard sides to provide cross-ventilation for the studios, which have no air-conditioning.Havana has many architectural gems, but few have been as well preserved. The studio spaces which line both halls are expansive, some with 35-foot ceilings adorned with domes and angel figurines. Not infrequently, small birds sail through the rooms, in one window, then out another on the opposite side. The floors, raised and “floating” to provide a more giving landing surface, are made of varnished wood. The once-gleaming surfaces are dulled by tens of thousands of practice steps and rosin, a substance dancers use to avoid slipping. In each studio is a keyboard or piano; all the classes have live accompaniment.On the morning Serrano enters the building, its broad, central marble staircase is thronged with hundreds of students here for the Encuentro Internacional de Academias Para La Enseñanza del Ballet (the International Encounter of Ballet Schools), a two-week intensive workshop.Serrano came back again, alone, in 2007, to meet a half-sister he never knew had existed. Hernandez, most of whose family has since moved to the United States, returned in 2011 with her sister.But it has been more than two decades since either has been reunited with their former teachers from the national school, most of whom have never left Cuba and many of whom have been observing Francisco in class over the past few days. Serrano mounts the stairway to the second floor and makes his way toward the narrow corner office of the school's director, Ramona de Sáa, his formative teacher and the person he hopes will provide the ongoing connection between this school and his own.“Ramona ... Ramona is God to me,” he says.Though they have been speaking by phone for weeks — arranging for his students' participation here and for de Sáa and a half dozen of her students to come to Florida this month for a workshop at Serrano's school — this is their first face-to-face reunion in 23 years. Photographs of de Sáa during her performing years hang on the school's walls, along with those of other illustrious graduates. She does not reveal her age — nearing 70, Serrano guesses — but she remains fit, sharp and remarkably unchanged. “Oh my God,” Serrano says.It is Hermes Rodriguez, also a native of Santiago and a former dancer with the Ballet de Camaguey. He now runs his own studio, as well as a government school, in Lima, Peru. They hug fiercely, their friendship undiminished by 23 years of absence. Serrano asks if he has seen Francisco dance yet.“Si, si, claro,” Rodriguez says. “El salto del papá, la flexibilidad de la mamá.” (“The jump of his father, the flexibility of his mother.”)Serrano nods proudly.“Yes, what he is doing now, I could not do when I was a professional,” he says of his son. “He took the best of each of us. He is now the way I could never be.”Serrano moves from one reunion to another: Lila Martinez, the ballet mistress at Ballet de Camaguey (“She was the best teacher for males. But oh, she will pick apart everything and put you in your place!”); Roberto Machado, a tall and slender former dancer now directing the classical dance program at the government music and art school in Monterrey, Mexico (“Machado! El rey de salsa! — The king of salsa!”); Alina, his piano teacher, still playing accompaniment for ballet classes at the school after 35 years; Aurora, the teacher he remembers as so beautiful he couldn't concentrate during class. (“And look at her still!”)He revels in the compliments about Francisco that everyone bestows. When someone says Francisco reminds her of a young Fernando Bujones, the American-born Cuban who shared the spotlight with Russian defector Mikhail Baryshnikov at American Ballet Theatre in New York in the '80s, he beams. (Bujones died tragically young, of cancer, in 2005 while directing the Orlando Ballet).“Can you believe? She compares him to Bujones!” Serrano says with a wide grin. “For me, Bujones was the one, much more than Baryshnikov. He was Cuban.”As his father celebrates old home week, Francisco joins a few dozen of his peers at the barre in one of the largest studios.He works quietly and scrupulously at a tendu exercise, as the accompanist plays “As Time Goes By” on a keyboard. Having positioned himself near a back corner, he seems intent on avoiding undue attention.

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